A fully operational Apple computer that Steve Jobs sold out of his parents' garage in 1976 for $600 will reach the auction block in December, where it is expected to earn more than half a million dollars.
The Ricketts Apple-1 Personal Computer, named after its owner Charles Ricketts, is being sold on Dec. 11, according to Reuters. The computers is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented as having been sold by Jobs, then 21, to a person from his Los Altos, California family home.
"It all started with the Apple-1 and with this particular machine," said Andrew McVinish, Christie's director of decorative arts, according to Reuters. "When you see a child playing with an iPad or iPhone, not too many people know that it all started with the Apple-1. So to be able to own a machine that started the digital revolution is a very powerful attraction."
The Apple-1 is being sold by Robert Luther, a collector from Virginia who purchased it in 2004 at a police auction of storage locker goods without knowing all the details of its history, according to Reuters.
"I knew it had been sold from the garage of Steve Jobs in July of 1976, because I had the buyer's canceled check," Luther wrote on a kickstarter page soliciting funding for a book on the machine's history.
"My computer had been purchased directly from Jobs, and based on the buyers address on the check, he lived four miles from Jobs."
The Ricketts Apple-1 was purchased by Bruce Waldack in 1999, an entrepreneur who had just sold his company, DigitalNation. Waldack eventually lost his fortune, left the U.S. and died in 2007, according to Reuters. The Ricketts Apple-1 was sold at a self-storage facility in Virginia, which is where Luther purchased it.
The device has been serviced by an Apple-1 expert, who was able to start the computer and get it to run the standard original software program, Microsoft BASIC, and an original Apple-1 Star Trek game to test it out, Christie's said.
The computer will be sold at auction with the canceled check from the original garage purchase on July 27, 1976 made out to Apple Computer by Charles Ricketts for $600, which Ricketts later labeled as "Purchased July 1976 from Steve Jobs in his parents' garage in Los Altos".
A second canceled check for $193 from Aug. 5, 1976 is labeled "Software NA Programmed by Steve Jobs August 1976."
Both of the checks were used as evidence for the city of Los Altos to decide if the Jobs family home on Crist Drive was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, according to Reuters.
The Henry Ford organization paid $905,000 at auction for one of the few remaining Apple-1 computers last month, which was more than twice the pre-sale estimate.
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